The one single quality of all good writing, whether it be advertising or Tolstoy, is specificity. This is, sometimes, mistaken as accuracy, as the mere piling and recording of details. But accuracy is insufficient. You can write trash which is full of accuracy about the calibre of the killer’s gun and the colour of the vamp’s hair, but it will still be generic.
Specificity is different. Samuel Johnson defined specific as, “that which makes a thing of the species of which it is.” Being specific means distinguishing the essential qualities. You might accurately describe a beetle, for example, as a small black insect, without ever specifying the essential features that make it a beetle. When you specify a programme of work—something you will do or make for someone else—you must imagine, ahead of time, what it will be. You might describe it or draw it or hum it or act it out, but you will have to give more than a list of details: a good specification gives you the essence of the request.
So many stories people tell you about their lives are boring because they are accurate, but not specific. Massing up details about the when and the where, about the weather and what one person had said to another, is just a laundry list of other people’s trivia unless the incident has some particular quality which make it a specific story, one you haven’t quite heard before. Otherwise it’s just a variation on “child was infuriating” or “colleague was irritating” or “man slipped on banana”—relating accurately what sort of loafers the man wore doesn’t improve the story. It drags it out.
In a company I once worked in, there was an old story about a Christmas party where, during a game when a member of staff has to say what they would do if they swapped lives with the Chairman for one day (they get the boat and the holiday home).
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